Challenge Partners

On the 26th-28th of June we were visited by a team of external reviewers fromChallenge Partners,a national “network of excellence” consisting of 430 schools across the country, who carried out a collaborative peer to peer review of our school. Our review was led by an Ofsted Lead inspector and a team of 3 experienced school leaders. A Challenge Partners review is different from other external inspections such as Ofsted and Local Authority reviews. The review’s focus is on teaching and learning, and does not consider areas such as safeguarding or governance and its outcomes so is not directly comparable to an Ofsted inspection. It is however an extremely rigorous process which focuses on School Improvement Strategies, Outcomes for Pupils and the Quality of Teaching, Learning at the school.

The reviewers were with us for 3 days. On the first day, they had the chance to look through the school documentation, such as our plans for further school improvements, our evaluations of the school’s work, and our data outcomes.

The reviewers spent the next two days of seeing the school in action, at both of our sites, including observations of teaching and learning from Nursery to Year 6 and looking at children’s books right across the curriculum. The purpose of this was to ensure that they could check that the quality of teaching is consistently high every day and across the whole school.

The team also held several meetings with school leaders to ensure we are developing robust plans for the school, that our judgements of the school’s work are accurate and to check that our monitoring is effective. Equally importantly, they spent time talking to lots of children to ensure their views about the school are heard too

We are pleased to let parents know that the review was a huge success. Unanimously, the reviewers came to conclusion that the school should be evaluating itself as ‘outstanding’ in all areas’ . They were extremely complimentary about the high standards and the quality of education and experiences that our children are receiving Invicta.